“Can you prove that it didn’t happen!?”

The 1959 film, Plan 9 From Outer Space, is famous for a lot of reasons.  There’s the low budget.  There’s the acting.  There’s the script. There’s Tor Johnson and Vampira and Bela Lugosi’s much taller stand-in.  There’s the string that’s visibly tied to all of the UFOs.  But let’s just be honest.  None of that would matter without the perfect introductionary scene!

And that’s where Criswell comes in!

Criswell was a self-proclaimed psychic and a friend of the film’s director, Edward D. Wood, Jr.  Criswell liked to sleep in a coffin and he also liked to make predictions.  The majority of the predictions were so outlandish that it didn’t matter that they were rarely accurate.  (Jeff wrote a whole post about this, a few years back.)  When Wood needed someone to vouch for the authenticity of Plan 9 From Outer Space, Criswell was the obvious choice.  Criswell even wrote his own lines.

Say what you will about the film but Criswell’s monologue — incoherent as it may technically be — is the perfect introduction and this seems like the perfect scene to use on the first day of our annual Horrorthon.

From 1959’s Plan 9 From Outer Space, here’s a horror scene that I love: